Information visualisation may be a left field topic to most accessibility researchers, however this month I found the proceedings of a conference called the International Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces which was held in Roma, Italy. The proceedings is full of interesting papers but one particularly has grabbed my attention called Implied dynamics in information visualization. This paper shows that even minor properties of visualisation such as borders, background areas, and the connectedness of parts, may affect how people perceive semantic aspects of data by suggesting different potential dynamics between data points.

Implied dynamics in information visualization

Information visualization is a powerful method for understanding and working with data. However, we still have an incomplete understanding of how people use visualization to think about information. We propose that people use visualization to support comprehension and reasoning by viewing abstract visual representations as physical scenes with a set of implied dynamics between objects. Inferences based on these implied dynamics are metaphorically extended to form inferences about the represented information. This view predicts that even seemingly meaningless properties of a visualization, including such minor design elements as borders, background areas, and the connectedness of parts, may affect how people perceive semantic aspects of data by suggesting different potential dynamics between data points. We present a study that supports this claim and discuss the design implications of this theory of information visualization.

Full Paper: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1842993.1843031
Full Proceedings: Proceedings of the International Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces, Roma, Italy, 2010.